Crimea

Orlando Figes is by any account a wonderful historian of Russia.  His Natasha's Dance was a brilliant introduction to the history of Russian culture and aesthetics.  His People's Tragedy:  The Russian Revolution, 1891- 1924 was an equally insightful book about the whole revolutionary era in modern Russian history.  Well-written, well-researched overviews of broad subjects, both books received a great deal of acclaim from various quarters.   Figes' The Whispers was an equally insightful book about private life in the era of Stalin, and offered readers a strong interpretative framework in which to make sense of Stalin's impact on the ordinary lives of Russians.  In light of these ventures, it's no wonder that Figes looms so large in Russian historiography.

In many ways, Figes' The Crimean War is another masterpiece of contemporary Russian history.   The books is of course detailed, objective, and fluid.  However, the book doesn't seem to offer many new perspectives on this important mid-nineteenth century event.  Indeed, the book seems to rehearse what historians have said about the war for many decades.  In fact, the book often seems like an old-fashioned diplomatic and political history.  Of course, one should never discount the importance of personalities.  Nicholas II and Palmerston were certainly key agents in the advent of war.  Yet one hoped that this new excavation on old soil would turn up something new.  

Figes' book on Stalinism wasn't a standard account of the man's murderous personality.  Rather, his book broke new ground, or at least summarized a new trend in the analysis of Russian life in a totalitarian culture.  But Figes' book on the Crimean War is sadly lacking in any kind of cultural analysis.  To be sure, Figes talks about religious discord in the Holy Land, but only insofar as that discord led to the entanglement of foreign powers that represented the various religious constituencies there.  And Figes also covers the Russophobia in the British press, but this phenomenon has obviously been described many times before.  

One has to recognize the strengths of The Crimean War.  Old-fashioned diplomatic, political, and military history isn't easily done.  Only Figes' mastery of dynastic politics, and a keen sense of the interplay between multiple courts, makes the story come alive.  But in the midst of the present crisis in Crimea, one wishes this book told us more about Russia and less about a diplomatic system that has been well-described by less talented authors on many occasions, though not recently.  

Orlando Figes' New Survey, Revolutionary Russia

One of the most highly regarded Russian historians working today, Orlando Figes has written a new survey of the entire Soviet revolutionary experience.  Entitled Revolutionary Russia:  1891- 1991, Figes' book covers the 100 year period between the great pre-revolutionary famine of 1891--a catastrophe which Figes says irrevocably divided the tsarist regime from Russia's intelligentsia--and ends with the formal collapse of the Soviet Union.  In some ways, such a broad survey of modern Russian history functions more like a textbook than a work of original research.  Even so, like Natasha's Dance before it, Figes' offers readers a wonderful narrative and many fresh perspectives on old controversies.  Figes' overall perspective on the revolutionary experience is of course profoundly negative.

Figes, who wrote another wonderful book on the horrific impact of Stalinism on private life, entitled The Whisperers, is naturally appalled by Stalin's record of economic mismanagement, military error, anti-semitism, and terror.  However, Figes' judgement against the Soviet regime places a lot of the blame for the Soviet Union's record of anti-humanism squarely on Vladimir Lenin.  Figes' describes the October Revolution as a military coup and claims that Lenin was almost eager to enter a Civil War in order to expand the Bolshevik base of popular support and undermine all other socialist or peasant party contenders for that support. Figes' perspectives on Bolshevik leaders isn't generally very original.  However, his analysis of Stalin does place new emphasis on the dictator's essential rationality.  Leaving aside questions of morality, Figes seems to argue that Stalin was almost always acting from rational motives.  Even with respect to the Great Terror, Stalin wasn't merely a victim to delusional paranoia. For one thing, the Soviet Union was in fact surrounded by two viciously expansionist enemies, Germany and Japan.   And certainly the Western allies didn't seem to be offering the Soviet Union a dependable alliance.   In this context, Stalin remembered the lessons he had learned from Lenin and the other Bolsheviks during the Civil War:  external enemies--i.e., the French, the Americans, the Japanese, and the British--often had internal counterparts--i.e., the bourgeoisie, the white army officers, and cossacks.

While Stalin understood that the majority of his victims were innocent, he was willing to trade the lives of many innocent people for the certainty that he would also condemn a few "real" spies and traitors from time to time.  The problem wasn't that Stalin was insane.  Instead, the problem was that Stalin had accepted the Bolshevik proposition that individual lives could be traded for the greater good.  Stalin's henchmen also accepted this logic, which was in fact but the radical expansion of Lenin's original approach to politics.  Lenin had of course advocated for the violent suppression of enemies, and often advocated for the use of force against the innocent as well.  Consider his interest in using hostages to enforce the good behavior of family members, or indeed consider his whole philosophy of making the children of the bourgeois and aristocratic classes suffer for the "sins" of their parents.

If Stalin's essential sanity seems hard to accepts in light of his policy of mass murder, consider the fact that Russians today continue to accept the logic of Stalinism.  As Figes points out in the conclusion of his book, when surveyed, a majority of Russians are expound two seemingly contradictory propositions:  first, that Stalin was responsible for the deaths of millions of Soviet citizens;  and second, that Stalin was an efficient manager who helped to modernize the Soviet Union.

To conclude, Figes' new book is a wonderful introduction both to the Russian Revolution and the Soviet Union as a whole.  However, the books real strengths are its coverage of the February and October Revolutions, as well as Stalinism and the Second World War.  The book is weaker when trying to explain the transition to the less brutal dictatorship of Khrushchev and his successors.  And perhaps runs out of steam when moving into the collapse of the regime.  It seems this weakness might stem from the lack historical distance from the subject matter, or indeed from the failure to analyze the collapse of the Soviet Union in light of what we know know about its Putin-dominated successor state. Figes' book is also primarily a political book, as opposed to a cultural history, which is somewhat surprising if one remembers Natasha's Dance, which was dominated by literary and cultural history.

A few quotes from the book:

"Until the end of their regime, the Soviet leaders all believed they were continuing the Revolution Lenin had begun."

"It was not Marxism that made Lenin a revolutionary but Lenin who made Marxism revolutionary."

"There is no God any longer.  There is no Tsar!"  Father Gapon.

"Everything has failed.  Let us build jails."  Mirsky.

"One would think that you are afraid a revolution will break out."  "Your Majesty," Bulygin replied, "the revolution has already begun."

"the commune existed because the peasants were poor, it served to distribute the budern of their poverty..."

"All revolutions are based in part on myth."

"The bread queues became a sort of political forum where rumours and ideas were exchanged by hungry citizens."

"The street generated its own leaders--students, workers, cadets, and NCOs, socialists whose names have never made it into the history books."

"The revolution of 1917 should be understood as a general crisis of authority.  There was a rejection not just of the state but of all figures of authority--judges, policemen, government officials, army and navy officers, priests, teachers, employers, landowners, village elders, patriarchal fatehrs and husbands.  There were revolutions going on in virtually every sphere of life."

"Take power, you son of a bitch, when it's handed to you!"  Krandstadt sailors to Chernov.

"insurrection is an art"  Marx

"Lenin's revolution was as much against the other Soviet-based parties as it was against the Provisional Government."

"The Great October Socialist Revolution, as it became known in the Soviet Union, was in fact such a small-scale action, being in reality no more than a coup, that it passed unnoticed by the vast majority of the inhabitants of Petrograd."

"You are miserable bankrupts, your role is played out;  go where you ought to go-into the dustbin of history!"

"We must make life so uncomfortable for them that they will lose their desire to remain bourgeois."  Lenin.

"For the vast majority of the Russian people the ending of all social privileged was the basic principle of the revolution."

"Lenin was prepared for a civil war and perhaps even welcomed it as a chance to build his party's power base."

"By 1920, 5.4 million people worked for the government.  There were twice as many officials as there were workers in Soviet Russia.."

"His political horizon is restricted, his theoretical equipment primitive..."  Trotsky on Stalin.

"Bolshevism has abolished private life." Walter Benjamin.

"Collectivization was driven less by economics than by politics and a general mistrust of the peasantry."

Lincoln and Figes

I'm very sorry to bore readers with more random posts that are occasioned by my need to pack up my office before taking a new job. Even so, these posts help me to negotiate the sadness of departure that I have magically transferred into a sadness at putting books into deep storage. At the moment, I'm putting away books by Bruce Lincoln, one of the great narrative historians of modern Russia. Lincoln wrote most of these books while a professor at a neighboring college, Northern Illinois University. I regret that I never got the chance to visit him while he was in the area.

Lincoln's books, mentioned previously, are all great, and include The Conquest of a Continent: Siberia and the Russians... Have I mentioned that by taking a position as dean of arts and sciences at another college I was forced to surrender my participation in a Russia travel abroad program that might have put me in Yekaterinburg? Well, actually, it turns out the program was postponed due to the financial instability of the partnering Russian institution of higher learning. The cancellation, in turn, put me in touch with a professional historian of Russia, who I hope to persuade to become a second author of this blog. So everything does happen for a reason..

The other Lincoln books I've completed and am thus packing up are In War's Dark Shadow: The Russians Before the Great War, which was wonderful aside from the aesthetic history that Lincoln may have gotten right in a more recent book. And there's also Red Victory: A History of the Russian Civil War. It was suprisingly late in my academic and teaching career to have finally figured out the basic outlines of that civil war. And I needed Lincoln's clear account of a confusing military situation to straighten things out for me. But survey courses of Western Civilization or modern European History cover World War I, the Bolshevik Revolution proper, Stalinism, and World War II at the expensive of the Russian Civil War.

And by the way, have I ever discussed how interesting it is to see the ancient "ex libris" stickers from a previous generation of Russian history bibliophiles? Even better to find a Moscow metro station ticket tucked away as a book mark. The ex libris stickers point to the beautiful futility of collecting anything at all. It ends up in a basement crate, of course, and then re-sold at an estate auction years later. And rare is the book that appears to have been read more than a single time, if the lack of wear and tear on most of my used books is any guide.

I also have Passage Through Armageddon: The Russians in War and Revolution, 1914- 1918, in front of me. How does one man churn out so many 600 plus page books of near-perfect prose?

Bruce Lincoln may belong to an older generation of historian whose work is seen as solid but slightly old-fashioned or unfashionable. If this is so, Orlando Figes may be his natural heir. Figes seems to be cited by everyone, and deservedly so. He's capable of writing strong narrative history but with a sensitivity to culture and at least some appreciation for theory. His People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution, 1891- 1924, is a sweeping account of a terrible epoch in Russian history. No doubt Figes previous work on the Ukraine made it impossible to emphasize anything other than pain and suffering in his account of the revolutionary era. Certainly his The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin's Russia continues a morbid account of the revolutionary tradition. (The horrible cover photo of a father's face scratched out in a family's personal family photo does justice to the sadness of the book itself).

But, like anybody writing in opposition to Red Propaganda, Figes may be overly sympathetic to the era of the tsars. Even so, Natasha's Dance: A Cultural History of Russia is a convincing argument of in favor of falling in love with the Russian people and their complex cultural tradition, notwithstanding the sadism of Russia's autocrats.

The Dzhan (Soul) of Russian Folk

If it weren't for Orlando Figes' review of Andrey Platonov's works in a recent New York Review of Books article my copy of Platonov's book of short stories, Soul and other Stories, might have remained unmolested for years to come. But Figes' authorative review, "A Great Russian Writer in the Communist Cauldron," assures me that Platonov easily makes the short list for the title of greatest Soviet era author.

Platonov, an early enthusiast for the great Soviet experiment, Civil War railway engineer working to keep the Red Army supplied, and probable participant in the forced grain levys that led to the starvation of so many Russian peasants, believed in communism, movement, machines, and the future. However, his enthusiasm faded and his unpublished novels such as Chevenguv (1929) and the Foundation Pit (1930), are an indictment of Stalinism. Even his early work, Epifan Locks (1927), which was warmly received by Gorky, seemed to suggest a critical analogy between Peter the Great and the rising socialist leader.

According to Figes, Chevenguv portrayed a dystopic world in which communists kill bourgeois inhabitants and then live without direction in obscurantism before Cossacks invade an invite suicide. Plotonov's biography reflects the stresses of the Soviet interwar years: in two decades, the writer went from being a true believe, to skeptic, to critic, to social realist (publically, in order to continue writing), and then finally, inevitably, to grief. In 1938 Platonov's son was sent to the gulag as a terrorist; Platonov contracted tuberculosis and died in 1943. Fortunately, a soul (a Russian one at least) can outlive its corporal shell, and many of Platonov's unpublished works have been uncovered since the fall of communism.

The Soviet Symphony

One of the great paradoxes of Soviet history is that this most unmusical of regimes could have produced so many great musicians. Russians dominate 20th century music like Germans did the 19th. Many of them drew sustenance, as Orlando Figes showed in Natasha's Dance, from peasant traditions and much of the beauty of the music stems from the tension between rural tradition and the lure of the modern.

Modernism in all the arts was an attack against the decadence and complacency of the West and its deep-rooted hypocricies. The Soviet composers were primed to exploit these opportunities because they could hook their cultural-aesthetic critique to the regime's socio-political critique. Or in many cases it was hooked on for them. Shostakovich's bitter, gray-hued memoir, Testimony mostly communicates the long-suppressed fury of an artist who survived terror, but was permanently crippled by it. He never misses a chance, though, to emphasize his Russianess and to ridicule artists as great as Stravinsky and Prokofiev for betraying their patrimony. American productions of his work were deemed superficial, and his visits abroad were invariably uncomfortable. Yet in 1942 there was Shostakovich on the cover of Time magazine, wearing an absurd fireman's helmet, leading, in American eyes, the united socialist-capitalist charge against fascism. Throngs of admirers greeted him in New York and elsewhere and he grudgingly put up with their adulation.

I think it did us a lot of good, during the Cold War, to listen to Shostakovich, to read Solzhenitsyn, and to sense the double negation of our own culture. First as Russians, then as modernists, they had little use for what they saw as a depthless, self-regarding, atrophied civilization. Today such a negation does not exist. Sure there are radical Muslims who renounce everything western. But they don't embody that renunciation in shared artistic, musical, or literary forms; their scorn, unlike that of the Soviets, descends to those forms themselves. As a result there can be no dialogue and no self-criticism. Maybe that is why we feel so adrift in the war on terror.

Best Historian of Russia

Today’s question: Who is the best historian of the Russians? And what should the criteria for such a contest be? I would say that if the main criterion is influence, the answer might well be Trostky. Everybody seems to quote his work and praise it, and of course it has the unusual merit of being written by one of the principle partitants in the Revolution. But, notwithstanding important commentary on a number of related subjects in modern Russian politics and culture, Trostky essentially limits himself to a single episode in Russia’s long history.

My sentimental favorite is Henri Troyat, who was apparently born in Russia but grew up in France. The man penned endless books on Russian history and literature, and they are all emminently readable if perhaps slightly formulaic. His biography of Trostky was a favorite of Orlando Figes—which says a lot. It makes for wonderful reading and is sympathetic even when it comes to some of Tolstoy’s more bizzare opinions and behaviors. The drama between Tolstoy and his wife is portrayed with a great deal of humor, but not ridiculed per se.

Troyat’s Chekhov and Turganev are excellent too. (I have yet to discover a copy of his Gogol or Dostoyevsky biographies—but can hardly wait until I do, and don’t quite want to spoil the hunt by ordering copies online). The Gorky biography is a first-rate introduction to the man, but it’s almost too short, too flippant, to deal with such a central man in the history of Russian literature. Of course, Troyat also deals with the emperors, and I have loved his Ivan the Terrible and Alexander I. The fault with Alexander I, it appears from subsequent reading, is that to tell a good story, Troyat seems to impute all historical processes to this man’s will when, in fact, even subscribing to the Great Man Theory of History, one has to admit that the leading generals and aristrocrats influenced Alexander as much as he influenced them.

Other candidates for leading historian? I’d put Bruce Lincoln right up there, although I admit the bias that comes from recently finishing about four of his books in a row, including his books on Siberia, the 1890s, the Revolution, and the Civil War. We’ll see how well he can deal with the history of Russian arts. Other candidates might include Tolstoy, who wrote now formal history but whose War and Peace had lasting influence on our perception of the Napoleonic invasion as well as on historiography itself.

Maybe Marx also deserves consideration, since Trostky and all other writers—both pro and anti-Revolution—formed their analysis based on his categories of analysis, however perveted to serve events he had not anticipated. And current favorites, in terms of producing the kind of history that would bear scrutiny from current historians at the top of their game, might be the author of Young Stalin and the Court of the Red Czar (the spelling of the man’s name elludes me), or Orlando Figes, whose The Whisperers may have even topped Natasha’s Dance.

Perhaps others will think Scott Reed’s fame gets him into the finals. Or some 19th century historian whose work was somehow foundational? Or the auther of the Magnetic Mountain? What's your vote?